One problem with Lithium Ion batteries is that they have a slight penchant for failing in a spectacular way when charged improperly or if heat builds up past a critical level. Some researchers have come up with a simple idea to prevent this from happening, applying a polyethylene film to one of the electrodes which changes size as the temperature changes, breaking the circuit when a certain temperature is reached which shuts the battery down. Once the temperature falls the circuit reconnects and the battery is usable once again. They do not expect this to impact the normal functionality of the battery, giving an extra level of safety with no performance cost. You can follow the links from Slashdot to see the research paper yourself.

"Scientists have designed a lithium-ion battery that self-regulates according to temperature, to prevent itself from overheating. Reaching extreme temperatures, the battery is able to shut itself down, only restarting once it has cooled. The researchers designed the battery to shut down and restart itself over a repeated heating and cooling cycle, without compromising performance."

When we first met Elemental Technologies Badaboom video transcoding accelerator it would only work with NVIDIA CPUs. Ryan tested version 1.1 of the program, taking various movies and recorded TV and transcoding it into formats able to play on Blackberrys, iPhones, YouTube and a wide variety of other formats.

The testing showed nice improvements when utilizing an NVIDA GPU and the ability to use multiple GPUs, each able to do their own transcoding simultaneously would help anyone who needed a couple of Blu-ray movies transferred to their mobile device in a hurry. The quality of the transcoding was of high quality and Ryan did not see any of the issues that were present when using AMD's Avivo, as there is little point in quickly transcoding video if it ends up painful to watch.

"Intel Quick Sync Video, built right into 2nd generation Intel Core processors, is breakthrough hardware acceleration that lets the user complete in minutes what used to take hours. Create DVDs or Blu-ray discs, cover video files for your media plater, and convert video for upload to your favorite social networking sites - all in a flash.

Badaboom uses Intel Quick Sync Video technology to transcode video files in just minutes. Why do videos need to be transcoded? In order for a video to play back on a device such as a smartphone or a tablet, it needs to be formatted to correct specifications. With so many different devices out there, odds are low a video from a camcorder will automatically play on all of them. That's where Badaboom comes in: it transcodes video files to play on hundreds of the most popular devices available today-and it does so quickly and easily."